EU Proposal Could Open Android to Rival AI Assistants
The European Union has pushed forward a proposal aimed at opening up the Android ecosystem to rivals of Google Gemini.
It comes under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which aims to curb the dominance of “core platform services”, a category that includes Android and, by proxy, Google. While not a formal investigation, the EU hopes the proposal will push Google to comply with the rules.
The EU wants gatekeepers of the digital market, such as app stores, search engines, and social media operators, to ensure a fair market where new entrants can compete. It has clashed with Google, Apple, and others over platform lock-in, and AI looks set to be the next battleground for the bloc.
Speaking on the proposal, EU competition chief Teresa Ribera said it “gives more choice to Android users about the AI services they use and integrate in their phone, including from the vast range of AI services that compete with Google’s own AI.”
Google has been steadily adding more Gemini features to Android, several of which have deeper integrations that are not interoperable with rival services such as ChatGPT or Claude. It recently announced a service that allows Gemini to perform multi-step tasks across multiple apps, with notifications alerting users when each step is completed.
This has drawn scrutiny from EU officials, who have already taken Google to task over the integration of its app suite within Chrome and its use of search to promote its own services above rivals. The EU has also opened an antitrust probe into whether Google used its dominance in search to improve its AI model by accessing vast swathes of content that rivals could not.
Google among several firms facing EU scrutiny
While Google may become one of the largest EU cases in the AI era, given its scale and dominance in mobile, it is not the only company under scrutiny. Meta has faced its own probe over the blocking of rival AI apps in WhatsApp, where Meta AI has been given prominence. The company was forced to reopen its messaging service to competitors, but has said it will only do so for the next 12 months, potentially inviting further regulatory action if seen as limiting competition.
The EU has also been at the forefront on deepfakes. The bloc voted to ban non-consensual deepfakes by a wide margin, following the controversy around Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot publishing sexualised AI deepfakes on X. This prompted xAI, the developer of Grok, to introduce stricter guardrails and place image generation features behind a paywall.
With the EU AI Act set to apply to all high-risk AI systems from June 2026, further regulatory action and probes into US companies are likely as the bloc pushes for compliance. The EU has been more active than the US and China in limiting how users can deploy generative AI tools, while also holding model developers to tighter standards.
Also read: Russian hackers are using Signal and WhatsApp phishing campaigns to target accounts, showing how messaging platforms remain high-value attack surfaces.
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